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Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

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Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#141

Post by jwr »

sukruh wrote: post #35

Most of the people I know who pursue creative/crafting hobbies alongside a software development job have chosen to work for well-known big companies, for prestige and safety, and ended up unfulfilled in their jobs. Most big companies are not good if you want to solve problems and build stuff. Especially "the enterprise", where software is seen as a cost center so the less of it the better. The effort of managing up e…

I run my own self-funded solo business. I talk to my customers and make a meaningful difference in their daily work. If I do my job right, they gladly pay me subscription money. I'm pretty happy with this, especially given that I choose my tools and technologies, and that my customers are smart engineers.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#142

Post by allen_berg »

krisoft wrote: post #120
mhaberl wrote: post #68

> Even my last team leader sent me a message out of the blue saying “I think I’ll run a bar. I want to be a bartender and listen to other people’s stories, not figure out why protobuf doesn’t deserialize data that worked JUST FINE for the past three years”. I worked at a bar when I was young, listened to the stories; the most annoying protobuf deserialization issues or 'Agile meetings' are freaking fun compared to th…

> Programming is fun, that is why you started doing it. For some. I certainly started that way. But many of my friends at Uni started from a different point. I heard many describing how they choose computer engineering because it is perceived as a good career or because they heard it pays a lot. I'm not sure if those people have the same "Programming is fun, that is why you started doing it." to fall back to.

A lot, most of the people actually who got into software for the past decade or so seem to have been motivated by money. They'd just as easily became doctors or lawyers. And it shows, a lot of software now is just some grey corporate kafkaesque mess.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#143

Post by [deleted] »

mhaberl wrote: post #68

> Even my last team leader sent me a message out of the blue saying “I think I’ll run a bar. I want to be a bartender and listen to other people’s stories, not figure out why protobuf doesn’t deserialize data that worked JUST FINE for the past three years”. I worked at a bar when I was young, listened to the stories; the most annoying protobuf deserialization issues or 'Agile meetings' are freaking fun compared to th…

[deleted]

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#144

Post by swader999 »

asddubs wrote: post #22
jeromenerf wrote: post #20

You can find all the problems of Software in Woodworking, except that sometimes, using an axe is a legal and well-suited move.

You would basically never use an axe in woodworking. It's widely considered bad practice, produces unstable results, and there are better tools available

I use an axe and a draw knife on logs. This closes the pores and helps preserve the wood longer than if you put a sander on it.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#145

Post by jvanderbot »

allen_berg wrote: post #142
krisoft wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Programming is fun, that is why you started doing it. For some. I certainly started that way. But many of my friends at Uni started from a different point. I heard many describing how they choose computer engineering because it is perceived as a good career or because they heard it pays a lot. I'm not sure if those people have the same "Programming is fun, that is why you started doing it." to fall back to.

A lot, most of the people actually who got into software for the past decade or so seem to have been motivated by money. They'd just as easily became doctors or lawyers. And it shows, a lot of software now is just some grey corporate kafkaesque mess.

The people responsible for all the packages on npm, pip, cargo, Conan really really love writing lots of lines of code to solve every imaginable tiny problem. So they are out there.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#146

Post by jwr »

usrnm wrote: post #56
sukruh wrote: post #35

Most of the people I know who pursue creative/crafting hobbies alongside a software development job have chosen to work for well-known big companies, for prestige and safety, and ended up unfulfilled in their jobs. Most big companies are not good if you want to solve problems and build stuff. Especially "the enterprise", where software is seen as a cost center so the less of it the better. The effort of managing up e…

What's wrong with doing a boring job for a lot of money and then getting all the fun elsewhere? This actually seems to be the best way to do it to me

It sounds like modern day slavery, or perhaps more precisely "corvee" labor. You have to toil away on your master's land before doing your own thing. I find it unbearable, but sadly much of the world has to deal with it.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#147

Post by josephg »

neon_electro wrote: post #134
josephg wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear you. But I’ve been programming for 30 years and I have some strong intuitions around where my code needs an empty line to space things out. Stuff like that. The day I first tried gofmt and it removed some of my carefully considered whitespace, I turned around, put blood on my hands in the old way and made a promise to the night that my soul belongs to me and gofmt will never sully my code with its corporate BS…

This is why linters are configurable; if your team doesn't care about consistent use of semicolons, ignore that linter. Right?

Sure; but when I join a team and they've already got a linter set up with stupid pedantic rules, they never seem to appreciate my complaints about it. "Oh god, can we not have that conversation again!". I understand. But nobody is happy.

Carpentry isn't my jam, but I've taken up piano. I love it.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#148

Post by wombat-man »

makerdiety wrote: post #93
ravenstine wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a level or two down from the abstraction of company size, crafting hobbies are also a reprieve from the tyranny of linters. So many programmers today believe that code is always better when it all looks identical. Consistency is a good thing, but not when it's expected to be absolute. Programming should actually allow for creativity, and where you decide to add spaces and newlines can actually add subtle but impor…

> Most places I've worked in the last 6 or so years are obsessed with tooling and add so many lint rules that it's often impossible to merge your pull request if you decide to format your code in a way that violates the rules in some trivial way. Shouldn't all the lines of code uploaded in a pull request be automatically formatted into the coding style preferred by the reviewer anyway? It should be like an automatic…

We can't check in anything that fails the linter, but we can also automatically format the code very easily.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#149

Post by filleokus »

sukruh wrote: post #35

Most of the people I know who pursue creative/crafting hobbies alongside a software development job have chosen to work for well-known big companies, for prestige and safety, and ended up unfulfilled in their jobs. Most big companies are not good if you want to solve problems and build stuff. Especially "the enterprise", where software is seen as a cost center so the less of it the better. The effort of managing up e…

I think there is something special about physical creativity that scratches a certain part of your even if you have a very fulfilling day-job.

"Even" Chris Lattner (of LLVM and Swift fame) which I as an outsider at least would say have a fulfilling job dabbles in the occasional woodworking: https://nondot.org/sabre/Woodworking.html

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#150

Post by anthk »

fredley wrote: post #36
anonzzzies wrote: post #10

I am working on coding stuff I like as escape for the absurdity of modern software. I make little games, stuff for 8 bit systems etc. Stuff that is as far away from anything modern , especially the hell of node, next, devops and ‘web frameworks’ as I possibly can. It works. It’s very relaxing, like a bonsai tree.

I do this too. Making games for the Playdate has been the most enjoyable programming I've done in years.

Check Uzebox, the console and the emulator are free as in freedoom.

https://uzebox.org/

Cuzebox as the emulator:

https://github.com/Jubatian/cuzebox

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